


Late Nights, Sour Wine and Old Leather

by Fontainebleau



Category: Flat Earth Series - Tanith Lee, The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-15 08:55:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28935891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fontainebleau/pseuds/Fontainebleau
Summary: Of the Lords of Darkness three were present from the world’s very beginning. Kheshmet, King Fate, was there in the moment the spark of life first appeared, watching over the twists and forks of its destiny; his uncousin Uhlume, Lord Death, was present in the second hour, for every living thing must eventually die. And when humanity appeared to walk the Flat Earth in its first age, you may be sure that Wickedness walked among them without need for invention. But Chuz? Madness, it seems, was not in the world by nature: Madness was created.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: New Year's Resolutions 2021





	Late Nights, Sour Wine and Old Leather

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gammarad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad/gifts).



> Happy New Year! I really wanted to write a Flat Earth story, and this one was sparked by Gammarad's wonderful Yuletide prompt: _Also, you could cross [Chuz] over with the Sandman series (Gaiman, Vertigo comics) and have him meet one of the Endless, too, if that seemed interesting_ , which, when I read it, just smacked me round the head with what a brilliant idea it was. It took me longer than I thought to write it, but I hope you enjoy the result.

Of the Lords of Darkness three were present from the world’s very beginning. Kheshmet, King Fate, was there in the moment the spark of life first appeared, watching over the twists and forks of its destiny; his uncousin Uhlume, Lord Death, was present in the second hour, for every living thing must eventually die. And when humanity appeared to walk the Flat Earth in its first age, you may be sure that Wickedness walked among them without need for invention. But Chuz? Madness, it seems, was not in the world by nature: Madness was created.

Were the denizens of that first age so sober, so measured in their existence? Joy they knew and despair, anger and tenderness; they burned with passion and wept with grief, yet they did so rationally, quarrelling or loving or weeping in due measure, accepting the world, harsh or kind, as it presented itself to them. What did it take, in that untroubled age, to crack that smooth and flawless surface and allow madness to enter?

\--

He had a name to begin with, he must have done: he had a mother and father, simple herders dwelling in a great plain of grass, and a sister who would sing to him as she rocked his cradle under the nodding seedheads. The domed hut of woven grass stems in its clearing and the herd of striped pigs, the sharp mare’s milk and the smoky scent of tea, the homely shrine with its big-eyed god and the sweet offering-cakes that decorated it – this was his world and all he knew: by day he ran stumbling among the rippling bronze stalks, chasing the birds that swooped and shrieked, and at night he lay watching his mother in the firelight as she braided her russet hair with gleaming copper wires. 

He would have lived and died a nobody, his life simple and unremarked, the cities, seas and empires beyond the horizons of his tiny domain unknown to him: but one day, grown old enough to be venturesome, he encountered among the grasses a shimmering butterfly. Enchanted, he stretched out a hand, but it fluttered from his grasp, bright on the pollen-soaked air. He followed, the butterfly dancing and lighting always just beyond his reaching fingers, leaving his father and the grazing herd behind him. Far and too far he pursued it, until he was invisible among the close-packed stems and beyond hearing, eyes fixed only on this elusive prize; and so the slavers came upon him, making him an easy prey with none to hear his cry or aid his struggles. 

His existence was turned upside down in an instant: first he jolted on the back of a wagon, bound and buffeted among a score of other captives, his pleas and wails ignored; he blinked briefly in sunlight on a harbour of stone, confronted by an impossible sea not of grass but of boundless unstable water; then into the pitching dark of a ship’s hold to lie sick and alone, wrapped in an endless nightmare. And when he finally stumbled down the gangplank onto dry land in a haze of shouts and dust, he could not comprehend a fraction of what he saw: the pillared buildings that towered around him, the strings of laden camels ferrying barrels and sacks, and people, more people than he had imagined the world could hold, all gesturing and quarrelling in speech he could not recognise. 

No ceremony attended his arrival: he was tradeable cargo, nothing more. In a trice all traces of his former life, the amulet around his neck and the tattered cloth shoes on his feet, were stripped from him; his hair was shorn and his clothes thrown aside for burning, and naked and nameless he went to the auctioneer’s block. A child still, he did not truly understand, gazing about him in baffled terror, oblivious to the peering faces and shouted bids, until suddenly a woman stood before him, her face a ghastly mask of white lead and powder and her hair darkly artificial. She reached with a papery blue-veined hand to grasp his chin and turn his head, and though he could not understand her words, the decision in her voice at least was clear: _this one_. 

It could have been much worse. His new mistress was a wealthy woman, imperious and easily displeased, but she was not cruel, or not at least by design. She sought a child as a kind of pet, a pretty entertainment to assuage her boredom, and he, red-haired and blue-eyed, was exotic enough to be diverting. _Play for me_ , she would command, and that was his work, to play at dice or with counters of glass on a chequered board, to tease the lazy gold-scaled fish in the courtyard pool and hunt for lizards on the wall to show in exchange for a sweet gelatine from the silver box at my lady’s elbow. It was no real childhood, merely the likeness of one: he must wait upon his mistress’s whims and perform his games at her desire, acting the part of carefree innocence while his whole existence was centred on her gratification. But in exchange she offered him something that might pass as affection, indulgent as long as he would chatter and smile and obey, and in his child’s world of house and courtyard, with no thought encouraged for anything but the present, he suffered no hardship, his clothes fine, his diet full and his labours slight. 

There was none to know or remember his past save him, and he retained no physical remnant of the child he had been: the only things he might have kept were the words in his mouth and the prayers in his mind, but why recall the speech he would never hear again or the god who had been deaf to his pleas? He answered to a new name, spoke new words stiff on his tongue, played under the empty-lidded stares of new gods in their niches, and all too easily his first life slipped from his grasp like the butterfly he had chased, leaving only fragments he might find in dreams – the taste of the sweet offering-cakes, the scent of smoke from a fire of grass and dung, a cradle-song hummed low. 

\--

The years passed easily, and there the rub. A child slave is not a child forever: the engaging boy must at length grow to a gawky adolescent, too clumsy and shy for his antics to be amusing. For his mistress, no great tragedy – what need she do but visit the market again to see a dozen more pretty toddlers displayed for her selection? For him, though, there came about a rupture as sudden as the first. Many such as he were sold to panders while their looks allowed, or simply cast out into the busy metropolis to shift as best they might without trick to earn coin or trade to work, but his mistress’ gratitude for his companionship was a little greater; his term as toy complete, she dispatched him to her rural estate where he might serve as labourer instead. And so he took another journey on a creaking cart, saw the gate to the courtyard close behind him and the house that had been his whole existence vanish at the turn of the street and a new world open to greet him once more. 

First they passed along a paved street of high-walled houses like his own, with bright mosaics laid before the doors and at the crossroads a carved fountain gushing water; then down the hill into the busy marketplace where the oxen must press through the crowd, past stalls and shouting hawkers; they crossed a plaza lined with porticoes and temples and joined a queue of carriages and wains flowing under a tall stone arch. The city alone was a revelation to him, so various and so strange, but through the gate were sights more astonishing yet: the road led them first through a packed necropolis, their way lined with great carved tombs, then as the day moved on they came to meadows spreading broader than imagination where white cattle and great white birds grazed side by side, vineyards laid out in rows as neat as the gameboard on which he had played and winding rivers plied by barges stacked high with cabbages and cages of chickens. He had not guessed the world to be so vast, a flood of sensation too great for him to encompass, and all he could do was gaze about himself in dizzied wonder.

At the end of the afternoon the weary oxen turned onto a smaller road and finally followed a rough track through cultivated fields, the earth-daubed labourers pausing in their work to stare as they went by, until they came to a low square building and a yard of barking dogs. His head was still spinning, more new things presented to him in a day’s span than he had seen in his whole short lifetime: yet all this was less astonishing to him than the alteration in his status he discovered at journey’s end. A brisk overseer’s wife exchanging his fine garments for a rough tunic and ill-fitting boots, a bowl of meal porridge instead of milled bread and plump olives, a bed of rushes to sleep on: all this distressing enough, but in the cold dawn came the truth of his new existence, work he could not do, instructions he could not comprehend and curses and blows at his uselessness. 

A harsh apprenticeship, but perhaps even so he could have learned, had he discovered aid friendship among his new fellows, but slaves themselves, how could they have met this pampered boy dropped among them with anything but resentment, a resentment that found outlet in a hundred petty mockeries and tricks. He was unhandy, hapless, too used to a world that treated him kindly, and now it seemed his life was to be only days of toil that left him too sore and tired to eat, buffets and bruises, confusion and shame.

He had no god to pray to and no hope of rescue, and to begin with he did no more than huddle on his bed, face turned to the wall in despair, but and in time, as he grew accustomed to the unremitting labour a fire began to kindle in his belly, slow-burning but strong. _This is not fair_ , he told himself. _It is not for me to live this life. I shall not_. Where he might go, how he might live – his plans were vague and fanciful and the days of work in sullen company and nights locked in the slave barracks, the vigilant overseer and the fierce dogs offered scant opportunity for absconding. And if he did so, how to evade recapture? The pretty child had been spared the hot iron, but now he carried on his shoulder the slave-brand to mark him property. Yet from the field where he hoed and dug he might glimpse passing travellers on the road, a tantalising reminder of the world he had left, and as the seasons turned he brooded, determination taking stubborn root. 

Opportunity presented itself unexpectedly at dusk after a painful day of grubbing in the stony soil, announced by a sudden clamour of the dogs. The other workers had long departed, their tasks complete, leaving him struggling to finish his allotted furrows alone with the surly overseer, knowing that he would return to find his scant evening portion eaten and his bed fouled. At the frenzied barking the overseer scowled. ‘What trouble now?’ He moved away a little to the edge of the field and exclaimed in irritation. ‘A beggar? He need not hope to find charity here.’ 

Sure enough, a brown-skinned monk in an orange robe had approached the farmyard gate, his staff and bowl held out in supplication. ‘Be off,’ shouted the overseer, but the man paid him no heed, speaking instead to the dogs which calmed and began to fawn on him. The overseer spat. ‘Useless curs. If they won’t chase him off, then I must.’ And grasping his cudgel threateningly he strode away. 

Obedient as a labouring ass the young man toiled on for some while, but as he reached the end of another furrow he paused, skin prickling in the unexpected silence. In the distance he saw overseer and beggar locked in argument, dogs milling eagerly around their feet, and here he was alone in the gathering dusk. No time for thought or trepidation – he threw down his mattock, snatched up the overseer’s forgotten cloak and fled. 

\--

Where did he go but back to the city, tracing the only route he knew. It was no easy journey, hiding by day and thieving for food by night, shunning all human contact for fear of apprehension, but finally he passed again under the great arch, still harbouring within his breast some vain hope of reinstatement to the carefree world of courtyard and childhood. Surely his mistress could find some place for him, surely she would soften to his plea, if he stood before her and showed his need? All he must do was find the house again, his last view of it engraved upon his memory, and he traversed the plaza and the broad avenue to marketplace with swelling confidence. But the city, though no great metropolis, was vast enough and his knowledge of it so vague that he never had a chance of refinding the quarter where he had lived and discovering the door that might return him to his past. Instead he was soon lost in a maze of narrow alleys with washing strung above his head and stalls spilling from doorways, every trader hailing him as he passed, entreating him to buy shoes or sweetmeats, fish or flowers, books or bread. It will be the next street, or the next, he told himself, I will recognise it, but turn after turn brought him only to another twisting street as raucous and daunting, ending at a crossroads with a well and marker-stone that he had surely passed twice and three times already. Too fearful to ask direction, he wandered until his feet were blistered and his belly griping, then when weariness overtook him he sank down, despairing, beside the entrance to a streetside tavern

The name of the tavern, Flora’s, was spelled out above its door in pebbled mosaic letters, and Flora herself, a plump harassed woman in a stained apron, stood behind its marble counter. She had no patience for indigents lingering at her door, gazing longingly at the covered pots of stew and driving away what passing custom she might hope for: she took her broom and ordered the young man sharply, ‘Off with you!’ Yet as he stumbled to his feet, stuttering an apology, something in his manner gave her pause. A remnant of his childish graces, a deference that labour had not had the chance entirely to coarsen? Hard-headed a tavernkeeper must be, and doubly so when a faithless husband had left her alone and indebted, but hard-hearted she was not, and instead of chasing him off she found herself setting a bowl of broth and a cup of water in front of him to hear his tale. As he ate, charming in his gratitude, she considered his pale good looks and gentle manner with an entrepreneur’s eye. The tavern was short-handed, that was true, and here an able-bodied and attractive youth desperate to work for the smallest recompense: should she refuse this fortune that had landed at her door? She raised her eyebrows at the brand that peeped from under his collar, but no more than that – in the busy stews of the city many hid such a mark under garments fine or coarse. A clean tunic and a pair of third-hand sandals, some brisk instruction in cleaning and serving, and in an instant he became a new person once more, with a new name sprung at random to his lips, a new patron and a new home.

He was old enough this time to demand of himself, _Am I happy?_ The work was no less laborious than on the farm and the days no shorter, hauling wine-crocks and sweeping out the kitchen, scrubbing tables and tending the pots of stew, fetching water from the crossroads well for the endless washing of cups and floors, but though he ate the night’s leftovers and drank the watered lees of wine he never went hungry, and in Flora’s teasing and the alley’s rough friendship he found at last sustenance for his empty heart. 

And again, a new world he must set to learn, this time of respectable neighbours and quarrelsome drunks, prostitutes and porters, third-rate wine and dubious meat, and a new lexicon too of coins and credit, bargaining and barter. He soaked it up, his first true education, and though his leisure was small, in time too he discovered too the sights and sounds of the wider city – its festival days and processions, the busy docks and the bloodsoaked circus, the music and incense of a passing funeral cortège and the shriek of peacocks calling at dusk from the aristocratic palaces on the citadel. 

Sometimes foreigners would come to sit and drink at the tavern’s tables, a pair of dark lithe sailors with topknots, or a mercenary soldier with a bushy fair beard and a filigree sword-hilt or a pale young scholar green-eyed and with hair as red as his own, and as he set flagons and bowls before them with the young man would wonder, had he once seen an amulet such as the one at this man’s neck? Had he touched the braided tassels of a cloak like this or heard before these notes of a reed-stemmed pipe? But his memory was a bottomless well, its sides smooth and sheer and his past beyond recovery – for all he knew one or another here could have been his own brother or cousin and he would have served them and joked with them all unaware. 

So the years passed and he grew to adulthood a scion of the city, jovial and sly, chatter quick on his tongue and his fingers scented with copper and old wine, and imperceptibly he rooted himself into a real life, one that might have thrived and bloomed – a life of workaday friendships and a place in the community, a marriage even, the age disparity set aside for a sharing of property and labour, and children of his own. 

\--

To a port such as this came cargoes of all kinds: wood and stone and hides, fruit and grain and animals, and with them sailors and merchants, mountebanks and travellers. All these and more came pouring down the gangplanks at the docks, and one day in the heat of summer there came in their company another unseen passenger, a gaunt sorrowful woman in a robe of yellow. Lady Plague went drifting through the hot streets unremarked, trailing her fingers in the fountains and tasting the ripe fruit in the marketplace, touching a burning hand to the brow of the child playing in the dust, and slowly the city began to sicken. A few at first, tossing for a week with fever, their flesh swelling and erupting with sores before they succumbed; these first unfortunates were quickly hustled to their graves, but the lady was persistent, spreading her affections from the lowest slums to the temples on the heights, and gradually whole quarters began to feel their unlovely visitor’s caress. 

The rich departed, of course, closed carriages bearing them swiftly away to distant hilltop retreats: those who remained mustered such efforts of defence as they might – balls of sweet herbs and smouldering bunches of thyme, vinegar-soaked bandages and scattered salt – but all to no avail: the yellow hag crept closer day by day, and soon a shopkeeper along the tavern’s street had sickened, and the children of one of the marketwomen; then neighbours and patrons one by one and finally Flora herself.

The door to the tavern was closed and barred and in the cramped room above the young man tended her as best he could, wringing out sheets to wrap her blistering flesh, and promising that the sickness would soon pass. But days went by and Flora only weakened, calling always for water, more water, even as he held the cup to her cracked lips. He would have brought a doctor, had there been any to call, pouring out their small savings in exchange for a cure, but for them there was neither doctor or cure and at the end he could do nothing but hold her hand as she died.

Even as he placed the coins upon her eyelids he felt himself grow feverish and lightheaded, his flesh beginning to gather into sores, and none left in the empty tavern to aid him; he must needs suffer alone, and soon a fire was raging in his limbs and suffocating in his throat, sending him gulping from the bucket, water spilling from his shaking hand, until it stood dry. A night of burning torment followed, and in the morning, rattling with fever though he was, some guttering spark of self-preservation brought him stumbling to the street, consumed with the thought of the gushing fountain, or better yet, the river where he might cast himself into the cool waters and find relief.

In truth the river, choked and foul with corpses, would have afforded him no succour, but in his weakened state the distance was beyond his strength: he staggered only a little way through shuttered streets, deserted even by the stray dogs that had nosed the market for scraps, before his legs gave way beneath him and he collapsed onto a set of shallow stone steps before a studded iron door. He lay, dizzy and parched, batting feebly at the spots which danced in his vision like plague-flies and pleading hoarsely for water, though the world seemed deaf to his entreaties. After a time, how long he could not say, a shivering seized him and a sinking lethargy; his eyes drooped closed and his flesh turned clammy, even though the baking sun stood high. 

He was beyond calling for aid, and the street’s inhabitants closed resolutely inside their homes, but there was at least one abroad, it seemed: a shadow fell across his vision, flickered away and then returned. This charitable passer-by approached and bent over the sick man, shielding him from the glare of the sun, and perhaps it was only that he was outlined against the brightness of the sky, but his skin seemed very dark and the hair that fell around his face as pale as the robe he wore. ‘Water,’ begged the young man, grasping at the stranger’s sleeve, ‘bring me water.’ 

Though his ears were ringing he heard a grave quiet voice reply, ‘The fountain is run dry; I can offer you only this.’ And in his ebony fingers the figure leaning above him held out a cup of polished bone. 

Did the sick man recognise his Good Samaritan? Perhaps he did, releasing his grasp on the stranger’s clothes, but even so he stretched out a hand to take the cup, his thirst too great to endure. Yet at that very moment there came from above him a metallic grating as of a key turned in a lock and the door at his back swung open. Voices exclaimed aloud; the stranger, wary of company perhaps, was no longer at his side, and as strong hands lifted him the young man swooned into a burning darkness.

\--

He awoke somewhere else entirely, in a dim high-ceilinged room where the air was cool and astringent: he lay in a clean bed all alone, though in the distance the chant of voices echoed hollow. Footsteps came and went nearby, and soon an old man appeared, cowled in brown and gravely pleased to see him stirring. ‘You are in the cloister of the Brothers of Atonement,’ the monk told him, and he fetched a bowl of bread and milk and helped the young man to sit and eat. 

Established long ago in the service of a duke grown old enough to be troubled by his lifetime’s sin, this stout-walled monastery housed an inturned and contemplative order, its austere practices rejecting all worldly pleasures. ‘The city is a place of sin and temptation,’ the brother told him serenely, ‘and we its calm and faithful heart.’ In truth the brotherhood was touched by something of its founder’s selfishness of purpose – was their infirmary so empty in such time of need? An order that truly loved mankind might have opened their studded doors and laid their church in the service of the sick and desperate, using their medicines to ease some part of the city’s sufferings. But these brothers had remained enclosed within their windowless cloister, singing their prayers and turning a deaf ear to the pleas at their gate. Only this one, cast up on their very doorstep, they had deemed a signal from their saviour too insistent to ignore.

How long he had lain unconscious the patient did not ask: something of the monastery’s untroubled atmosphere had perhaps leached into his bones as he slept, until the burning suffocating city seemed only a dream that he was glad to let pass from him. When he was sufficiently recovered to rise from his bed, he found himself no longer as he had been: his skin was scarred and pitted, his hair had been cropped and though there was no mirror to show his face, under his fingers he felt it stiff and changed also. His pretty looks were lost entirely, but his brother monks took thought only for his soul and seeing how he flinched from the thought of return, of the damage done and the life upended, the ageing brotherhood welcomed him gladly among their number. ‘God sent you to us,’ said the abbot, and in his gratitude the young man knew it to be true.

Another name to replace the old and a habit and sandals to dress himself: he took to his heart the creed and the rule, embracing the ritual with a convert’s passion. Each day the same with its round of lauds, terce, nones and vespers, each season with its solemn festivals and tasks: he took the monastery’s regulated life as a balm to his soul, as though in some way he divined the need for a structure to hold a cracked vessel together, a rigid framework which might contain his fractured selves. In his period of trial his obedience and devotion could not be faulted, all thoughts of the world outside put firmly from him, and when the trial was done he made his final vows without a moment’s hesitation, pledging himself wholeheartedly to the service of the church. No longer a child, he could not be a blank slate, but this time he made it his choice to forget, cauterising all his past: if fragments of his former lives returned to him as he laid offerings at the foot of a statue, tended the green shrubs in the apothecary garden, or served a meal to his brothers at the scrubbed board tables, he put them deliberately from him, He would not let himself regret what he had lost, filling himself up instead with faith and certainty: _God has willed this for me_. 

This life too he could have lived, content in the comfort of faith and the ascetic fellowship of his brothers, taking the god’s purpose for his own: as he knelt in the side-chapel or swept the patterned tiles of the cloister he prayed only to be an empty chalice for his saviour’s grace to fill. And was it perhaps that scent of emptiness, of hope and fervent desire that brought mischief questing in a hunt of its own?

\--

The repentant duke and founder of the order was long in his marble tomb, but his aristocratic branch lived on, its latest flowering the most delicate and lovely of all. Heir to the fortune and an enviable palace on the city’s highest hill, the contessa was as distinguished among the city’s nobility for her wealth and beauty as she was for her extravagance and heartlessness. She and her coterie scorned their fellow aristocrats’ polite diversions – earnest musical salons and orderly masques, carefully-cultivated gardens and galleries of paintings – as tedious; among themselves they sought more heady entertainment in wine-soaked revels, exhibitions of perverse grotesquery and contests of petty cruelty. For a season the fashion would rage for combats staged between exotic animals or games of sport where the stakes were human lives, the doomed and desperate combed from the city’s stews to be gambled at will; one might impulsively choose an impoverished artist and elevate him to fame or install a market-girl as silk-clad consort, then, the bloodlust sated and the fancy exhausted, the tigers would be left to languish in their cage and the favourite be cast out to starve once more.

Mistress of a dissolute court, doyenne of decadence – and also, by inheritance, worthy patroness of the Brothers of Atonement. In due time the fancy seized the noble contessa to inspect this holy part of her estate, and at the year’s great feast, as the brothers sang their praises, she graced the service with her presence, escorted by an aristocratic cavalier. She was of rare and outstanding loveliness, even the aged monks must appreciate, her hair a cloud of midnight black caught in a net of pearls, her lips of damson against the dusky vellum of her cheek, her gown of velvet most modestly cut, yet clinging softly to every curve as she walked the aisle with eyes downcast in apparent piety, though the smallest of smiles played on her lips beneath her lacy veil.

Our brother monk, absorbed in his heartfelt devotions, was one moment an empty vessel seeking divine grace: then she passed by beside him and in his eyes it seemed a second sun had arisen to outshine the old. In her light the statues he had worshipped became pale and bloodless, the silver vessels tarnished and dim; he drank in her beauty until he was full to overflowing, his attention rapt upon her smallest gesture and the laughing murmur of her prayer. Nothing in his life had prepared him for such lightning in his soul, and when at the end of the service the cavalier conducted the contessa back along the aisle he dared not look into her face, but the stir of her ruffled train as she passed breathed like a kiss upon his skin. My lady looked neither to left nor right, but the gentleman on whose arm she leaned, dark of hair, pale of skin and as strikingly handsome as his mistress was beautiful, paused to look full in his face, with an expression in his fathomless eyes as of one who savoured a rare delicacy.

A moment’s vision all too brief, yet from that time the young brother’s adoration fixed itself on one object only: in his mind it was now she to whom he prayed, her face in his thoughts as he raised his voice in the holy chant, hers the cool hands of the statue he clasped. He was enchanted, thralled, though to himself he cast it through the prism of his calling, making his new-found devotion a spiritual thing: was not all this, the order and its devotions, for the salvation of her ancestor and thus for her? His brother monks commended the renewed fervour with which he worshipped and worked and studied: they could not know that for him the image of the contessa had replaced that of the saviour god entirely. But mischief, having sampled the dish so freely offered, was not long in returning for a fuller portion. 

Among the new acolyte’s duties was the preparation of herbal remedies from the cloister garden: infrequently occupied though it might be, the shelves of the infirmary were well-stocked with physics for all common ills. One day as he was working there the elderly brother who had first tended him appeared, bidding him pack jars of salve and tonics and accompany him to attend a patient who summoned them beyond the order’s walls. Obedient, the young monk waited at the gate with case in hand and went with his superior into the busy street with eyes downcast against temptation; it was the first time since his arrival that he had ventured from the cloister’s safety, and the stares and whispers which followed him reminded him how strange his looks had become. He knew he should not care, his outer form of no relevance to the flame of faith he carried in his heart, but even so he quietly drew his cowl over his head to shield himself from view. 

He assumed their destination to be among the poor, perhaps an almshouse or hospitaller’s lodging, but to his consternation their journey took them upwards, away from the narrow alleys of the lower quarters and onto the tree-shaded boulevards of the citadel. It puzzled him, that one well able to afford any number of physicians would summon two poor brothers, but it was not his place to offer comment and he held his peace. They passed the front of one great house and another next, and the monk’s heart began to hammer in his chest: _could it be so?_ The question burned upon his tongue, but he dared not ask it of the brother pacing calmly at his side. 

At last they halted at an entrance flanked by twin lions on pillars of porphyry where his companion boldly entered, approaching the gatehouse to speak briefly to the guards. A servant appeared to lead them across a broad flagged courtyard and through a doorway into a true palace. The young monk had never seen such rooms as they traversed, public chambers with mirrored walls and painted ceilings, a gallery lined with statues overlooking a garden terrace, a panelled library of book sin gilt and calf; then along a corridor of private chambers, its walls hung with silk and delicate carpets under their sandals. 

They were conducted finally to a room where a riot of painted birds sported among the branches on the wall and their patient awaited them, reclining on a couch dressed in a flowing robe of inky blue. The dark and icy nobleman who had previously attended her was absent, though at the back of her couch, of ebony inlaid with tortoiseshell, lounged a youth of elegantly androgynous cast, golden-eyed and condescending in manner. 

The contessa was as entrancing as he remembered, or more so, her hair unbound and limbs gently outlined beneath her gleaming gown; he stood awestruck, ready to fall to his knees in adoration, as the lady raised her head. ‘Good fathers, it is a comfort you have come,’ she said so earnestly it might have been true. ‘The pains have tormented me night and day, so I can find no rest.’ The youth surveyed her in alarm for signs of illness but saw none, save only a slight flush on her cheek. 

‘Place your trust in our Saviour, my daughter,’ replied the old man piously, ‘and tell me what it is that ails you.’ 

The lady leaned on her attendant’s arms to draw herself up against her pillows. ‘See.’ She drew back her sleeve to show a slender wrist. ‘I am quite wasted, and a fire runs through all my joints.’ 

‘Most concerning,’ clucked the elder monk, then with more severity, ‘My brother, the medicines, if you will.’ 

Recalled to his duty, the young monk set the case on a side table and began to lay out the jars and bottles, though his attention drifted back to the couch where attendant and mistress whispered together. The lady caught his gaze and stretched her limbs restlessly, the robe shifting fluidly over her form. ‘My feet also, good father,’ she declared, lifting the hem of her gown a little, ‘pray feel how the flesh is diminished.’ 

‘Perhaps an ointment,’ suggested the golden-eyed attendant helpfully: the monk had though them first a young man, but as they assisted their mistress to set her feet upon a stool they seemed delicately feminine in their manner. 

‘Of course,’ fussed the old infirmarian happily, ‘I shall give you a tonic to drink and my brother will apply a soothing ointment to your ankles.’ He held out the jar, and while he busied himself measuring out a thimble of some tincture the young brother knelt trembling beside the lady’s footstool. 

‘You may remove her slipper,’ prompted the attendant and as he loosened the beaded heel the young brother bent his head low to hide his face. With the lightest of fingertips he smoothed the ointment over each high-arched foot, oblivious to all but the touch that sank silver needles through his flesh. When he was done he raised his eyes to find her dark gaze intent upon him, and it was all he could do to restrain himself from brushing with his lips the delicate skin he had salved. 

‘Your attentions are much appreciated.’ 

The attendant was holding out a clinking pouch; the young brother drew breath to reject it, but ‘We shall sing a mass each day for your recovery,’ declared the infirmarian devoutly, and he seized it and tucked it into his sleeve. He motioned to his companion to repack the medicines. ‘Pray summon us at any hour should there be need.’ 

As he led the way to the door the young monk could not resist one final look, and the contessa’s shadowed gaze followed him so it seemed that her answer of, ‘I shall’ was addressed to him alone. 

They made their way back down the hill, the elder brother becoming expansive, no doubt warmed by the purse in his sleeve, and expounding on their patron’s grace and generosity, but the young monk, shaken to the core, could utter no word of reply. Where before he had worshipped an abstract image, a woman distant and ethereal, now the object of his adoration was to him a woman of flesh and blood whose intimate form he had seen and touched, and that touch a spark to a conflagration. And she had looked on him so gently and trustingly… He was foolish, of course, naïve and self-deceiving, but who among us is ever wise in the face of love?

As soon as he was alone he sought the monastery garden, approaching the well with quick-beating heart, for he know what he must do. For all this time he had taken no consideration for the ravages of disease in his face, his outer appearance irrelevant compared to the flame in his heart: but now, mustering his courage, he leaned over the still surface of the water and what it showed him was cruel. How could he dare to desire a being so lovely when none might look on him with anything but pity and disgust? But desire he did: where faith had once burned clear and bright now a smoky flame of lust smouldered within him, and with the memory of that warm velvet skin singing in his every nerve he could no longer pretend that his worship was holy. 

_She will summon us again_ , he told himself, and when a little time had gone by, _It must be soon_ , and he haunted the infirmary fretfully, resentful of the call to devotions and the secular tasks he must complete, chafing even at the need to eat lest he miss his chance to be recalled. Every night he yearned in dreams, reliving that touch, and every morning he woke tortured and unsatisfied. 

Still no summons came, and in the end the cloister which had been his refuge took on the seeming of a cage: how could he bear to keep himself always within these walls, when all the time _she_ was in the world? The vows he had embraced in gratitude now gripped as bonds of iron, and the idea of escape was not long in coming to him. To disavow his faith and turn his back on safety, all for love: it was the height of folly, but what lesson had life taught him save that nothing will last and there is no way back? Each fresh betrayal so easily made, the world setting his feelings at naught, and now at last a betrayal of his own: for the first time he was neither thrust from a life he cherished nor driven by despair – now he followed the deceitful fire of hope, dreaming of how he might beg his way into her service and lay his heart at her feet. 

He crept from the monastery at evening while his brothers were at prayer, his plan barely formed: he had no disguise to don and nothing to offer save his own disfigured body. But love and despair lent him a wild baseless courage, leading him once more up the steep hillside to her palazzo with no more intention than casting himself down at her door. And this time too, Fate stood by to set a hand upon the wheel. 

At the courtyard gate with its guardian lions was assembling a troupe of mummers, bidden to perform the evening’s foolery – a grape-crowned pot-bellied king riding on a donkey and his retinue of costumed followers, a dwarfish clown and a willowy dancer clad in a tunic of shimmering green-gold scales, a bearded female giant and a red-robed doctor in a beaked mask. ‘Way for the Lord of Drunkenness,’ cheered the sentries as the cavalcade went lurching under the archway, and one of them, assuming this ill-favoured monk another in this parade of grotesquery, shoved him merrily in their wake. 

‘By hell, a priest!’ exclaimed the doctor. 

‘Heaven bless us!’ tittered the clown, and they swept him along, shouting and braying, the dwarf fumbling an ass’s jawbone into his hand. 

And so he came stumbling into the hall, dazzled by the candles and deafened by the shrieks and jeers, and at the head of the table he saw his beloved shake with laughter and heard her cry, ‘Welcome, good Brother Ass!’

So began his next life as entertainer in an aristocrat’s train, Brother Ass in truth, his habit a most delicious parody of faith: at daybreak he would be summoned to hear the lamenting confessions of the courtiers and shrive them of their sins, while at evening’s approach he would raise his hands in blessing on their debauches. And many were the sins to be forgiven – gluttony and wastefulness, lust and petty malice and greed. None could walk such a world and remain uncorrupted, and soon, as he obeyed his patrons’ every request, all his dignity was shed. Sometimes a lady would expose her breast in simulated repentance, begging him to lay on his hands and bless her, or the court might call for an exhibition of self-mortification and contrition, and he would shed his robe and beat his shoulders with the knotted flail until they bled. He lived always in fear of banishment: few enough, he saw, could retain their favour and their place for long, discarded when their novelty was spent or their beauty became banal. Only the amber-eyed aesthete seemed ever-present, lingering at my lady’s side to whisper in her ear and observing the proceedings with a detached amusement. But to Brother Ass the degradation and abasement were as nothing, his faith unwavering: the contessa was his spirit’s dark lodestar, and to see her day by day and night by night was all he craved, gazing on her face and hearing her laugh, even in scorn. 

\--

A season, and another, and for the lady, mistress of bacchanals, even the inexhaustible delights of the metropolis began at last to pall; a lethargy fell upon her and her court that death-fights in the circus or torchlit expeditions among the city’s lowest haunts could not dispel. No remedy but to seek fresh diversion abroad, the whole dissolute court choosing to decamp: the rooms of the palazzo were draped in sheets and closed, the servants discharged and the animals in the garden left to prey upon one another unattended. Where they journeyed he was not privy to, but a great caravan was assembled, a travelling cavalcade of feather-beds and banqueting-tents, cooks and grooms, groaning wagons and even a confused swaying elephant carrying a canopied seat on its back, a remnant of the menagerie saved and brought along as a curiosity. And for him, the same: the mummer monk was to retain his place in the retinue after all, the false confessor too piquant a joke to lose, and so when the train of carriages and carts went winding through the gate, he was part of it still, trailing behind on a true ass. 

The procession wound its way from the city’s outskirts across the plain and thence into the hills, its progress purposefully slow, halting to picnic or to hunt or to exploit the hospitality of some astonished country town, declaring a feast day and a night of revelling. For the courtiers, enjoyable enough, but the monk discovered to his dismay that as they journeyed his patroness’s attention to him was much diminished; for days at a time, unsummoned, he would rode among the train of subordinates and servants, who passed the long and wearying days in petty quarrels and empty boasting. So close to his beloved, yet for all he saw of her he might as well have been back in the brothers’ cloister; the flame within him burned only brighter for his despair, and as the caravan descended from the hills and began a detour around the margin of a desert waste, he filled his empty days in ruminating on how he might earn her notice and edge closer to the radiance of her approval once more. At night, staring into the embers of a fire while his fellows snored around him, he would dream of saving her from a lion, perhaps, or of repelling a gang of bandits intent on robbery and rapine, dwelling on the words she would murmur to him after of gratitude and favour, and in his wildest flights of imagination, her gaze of melting love. 

Such towns as lay along this desert road were ill-prepared for the descent of the wandering court: its demands for food, for wine and entertainment, fodder for its beasts and repairs to its vehicles taxed their resources, dwelling as they did at the land’s inhospitable margins, to their limit and beyond. But out of fealty, or an ingrained habit of generosity to strangers, or perhaps only from trepidation at the consequences of refusal, they would reluctantly open their gate and share as much as they could not reasonably hide, making the best of their noble guest’s unexpected visit in celebration and show, and doubtless cursing her name as soon as the cavalcade had lumbered into the distance again. 

This particular town was no different, as backward and provincial as all the others they had seen, and forewarned of the caravan’s approach, the fleabitten inn and blacksmith’s forge were standing ready, and in the square a fire was lit, a flow of townsfolk rolling barrels and carrying platters to the trestles near it. The citizens were perhaps a little less practised at concealing their resentment and the chief magistrate extending less effort than was customary to keep the hostility from his tone as he made the speech of welcome, but probably the whole event would have passed without incident, at the cost only of a season’s privation and a few winter deaths, had not a grizzled farmer driving his ox to slaughter for the feast crossed paths with a self-important chamberlain. ‘Move your beast and quick about it, you oaf,’ ordered the official haughtily. ‘My mistress cannot walk through a midden-heap to dine.’ 

The farmer paused, looking him over with ill-concealed contempt. ‘Your mistress would have an honest man’s livelihood served to her and her toadies, and not even a pretence to grace or gratitude.’ 

The chamberlain, irritated, brought his staff around, striking him a glancing cut, more to shame than to wound. ‘Be grateful for _that_ ,’ he told the man, ‘and that you retain a portion of your miserable living.’ 

The farmer, as thick-necked as an ox himself, answered with a blow that laid his assailant on the ground just as the contessa herself appeared on the arm of her latest favourite. He, seeing the townsfolk looking on with rather too great an interest, toed the chamberlain disdainfully. ‘Pray, good host,’ he said to the farmer with an appearance of good humour, ‘let your ox be dispatched with all speed, so we may feast together.’ 

The farmer scowled, a respect for nobility not quite sufficient to restrain his tongue: his muttered rejoinder, ‘So you may feast and we may starve,’ brought a ripple of response from the crowd. 

‘Come now,’ said the cavalier, one hand on his sword-hilt. ‘My lady is weary from travelling, and famished; surely you would not see so rare a flower deprived of nourishment?’ 

At the mocking words the farmer balled his fists, flushing with rage. ‘Take it, then, you and your greedy trollop, and much good may the feasting do you when the devil comes to take his reckoning.’ 

A dozen daggers and swords sprang from their sheaths, but the contessa, unperturbed, held out a hand and said coolly, ‘Such words cannot go unavenged: who will champion me?’ 

The farmer spat, no doubt expecting some bravo to spit him in an instant, but the monk recognised his moment, poised breathless on the sticky air, and before any other could speak he strode forward declaring, ‘I will.’

A burst of laughter went up, but the contessa inclined her head gracefully, just as in his dreams. ‘Why not?’ A smile danced on her lips. ‘God will lend his force to your chastisement, I am certain.’ 

‘Give them swords,’ commanded another voice, and two blades landed thudding into the dusty ground between them. The farmer seized one, trying its edge with his thumb, and the monk quailed a little – of course he had no skill in swordsmanship, for what in his life had prepared him for the use of weapons? Nevertheless he picked it up and as he grasped it, taking stance to face his adversary the glint of sunlight on its blade was as a flare of courage in his soul.

The onlookers had crowded eagerly around them, courtiers and townsfolk together: the monk swung with his sword, clumsy and unpractised, but the farmer, though sinewy and strong, was as untutored as he and their fight a slow and sorry affair of hacking cuts and awkward parries, neither landing a blow upon the other. Gaining in confidence, the monk pressed closer on his opponent as the courtiers cheered and shouted laughing encouragement, but sooner than he thought his breath began to labour and sweat to run stinging into his eyes. The farmer recognised his opportunity and rushed in with a rain of blows that sent the monk to his knees: but faith was in his heart still, and with his lady’s name upon his lips he swept his blade around in a lucky cut and heard his opponent grunt in pain. A dark flower bloomed on the man’s leg and a cheer went up as he reeled back; yet at the sight a sudden guilt squeezed the monk’s heart: who was he but a blameless husbandman, after all, deprived first of his animal and his means of livelihood, and now maimed in addition? 

The pang of compassion and the moment’s hesitation it engendered were his undoing: the farmer lunged back upon him, his sword-arm scything down with the all force of his powerful frame, and for the monk there came first what seemed a dull blow on his wrist and the inexplicable sight of his sword and the hand which still grasped its hilt falling to the dust at his feet; then there followed a blast of white-hot pain that clove his head in two, and he fell to his knees, pitching face-first into the dirt. ‘ _That_ for your mistress’ honour,’ spat the farmer above him, and the stained sword bounced to the ground beside his face. 

Fighting to draw breath and cold with nausea, the monk was barely aware of the uproar around him, courtiers and villagers cursing and struggling in a free-for-all: the only thing he saw with any clarity was the blood that leaked steadily from his wrist, shockingly red. The world seemed very far away: then a pair of high ribbon-trimmed shoes halted just before his nose, and he felt on his brow the stir of air from a ruffled travelling-coat. He strained to lift his head, to frame the words, but he could not even look upon her face: instead he heard her say one last time, ‘Poor Brother Ass’, or perhaps he only thought he did; then she stepped fastidiously over the pool of blood already thickening in the sun and beyond his sight.

None cared to succour the imprudent warrior: they let him lie for the long while it took for the train of carriages to creak into motion again, and the longer time until it dwindled into the distance, wavering at the horizon and vanishing. His donkey, left unharnessed, came to nose at him in puzzlement, then wandered off, a boon for some grateful villager. And eventually, when the day’s heat had faded and the warm night wind was beginning to stir the dust, the monk staggered to his feet, cradling his arm, and went limping on his way alone, following the tracks already half-covered by the sand.

\--

Madness was not yet in the world, but this desert teetered hard upon it. Baking by day and freezing by night, its only water lay in shallow pools pink and brackish with natron, and its few stunted trees grew twisted, their leaves leathery and sparse. It was already a place of deception and unseemings – in noonday’s heat the sand would shimmer to water and the water congeal to glass, while in the frosted moonscape of night the treetrunks would become brass and their leaves plaques of thin-cut agate which clinked like ceramic. 

Nameless once more, the injured man left the road and wandered without purpose or sense of self-preservation, as indifferent to thirst or fear as to his scabbing wound. At first reason attempted fitfully to reassert itself: he might spy in the distance an ocean of grass, familiar and welcoming, and run towards it only to find himself in a bowl of crumbling dunes, or feel pain lance through his fingers and reach to grip them, only to find that his hand closed on a truncated stump. But soon the bright toxic lizards he snatched to eat and the bitter water he drank set his mind free to flights of hectic fantasy. Under the midday sun he walked among bones, the long-scoured carcase of some gigantic animal, its ribcage swelling like the vaults of a cathedral far above his head and the flies kissing him, murmuring comfort; at dusk he sat on the shore of a metallic lake and watched while a shoal of fish rose from the water to set up a stately dance through the air, their flapping fins and tails reflected in the surface below; at dawn the spotted hyenas would sing, their voices sweet, and he led them in their orison as a choir of brothers. 

There was a peace in it, the abdication of selfhood and the gradual surrender to impossibility, and in time it came to him that the desert had imparted to him an important secret, a revelation that must be shared with all. For a great while he encountered no living soul to whom he could offer this newfound wisdom, but in his random wanderings he came eventually to a village set beside the green thread of a river and without hesitation he strode along the bank to where the men were spreading out their nets and the women sitting at their spinning, afire to address his audience.

It was by no means the first time a prophet had emerged from the desert, wild-eyed and earnest, to harangue them: the inhabitants of the river-village, poised as they were at civilisation’s margin, were as despondently inured to such visitations as to the annual descent of the tax-collector and the occasional passing cloud of locusts. This tattered visionary, his features strangely formless under the scour of wind and sun and one wrist ending in a desiccated stump, had no more sense to offer than the last but they listened gravely until his disjointed preaching ran to a standstill, then cautiously offered him water and bread and a seat under a shading tree. 

While he ate the village elders considered him reluctantly. Most who emerged from the waste were of little account, petty malefactors or wandering beggars, but from time to time one would prove to be a traveller sought by a grieving family or a criminal in flight from justice. Should this one be aided? Apprehended? ‘His garments have the look of a religious man,’ murmured one. 

‘Yes, but see,’ whispered another, ‘the mark upon his shoulder. Someone’s slave?’ 

‘Not one-handed,’ objected a third. ‘And his eyes are pale. Was he separated from some caravan across the wastes?’ 

Perplexed, they approached to question him, and the prophet raised his ruined face to their scrutiny with a calm forbearance. ‘You come from far away,’ observed the third man. ‘Were you a traveller, a merchant perhaps?’ 

‘Yes,’ replied the wanderer, but the first man frowned. 

‘You wear the habit of a holy brother. Have you taken orders?’ 

‘Yes,’ agreed the prophet with a smile. 

‘Not so,’ contradicted the man who had spoken second, ‘when you carry the brand of a slave. You escaped your master, it would seem.’ 

‘Yes,’ he answered, yes and always yes, until his hearers were as confused as he. Eventually these simple people decided here was a matter for a higher authority: the provincial magistrate might give judgement at his next visit, and what purpose indeed for the taxes they must pay, if not to lift the burden of investigation from their shoulders? For the present, then, the prophet was conducted politely to a dwelling beside a flowering fig tree with a bed for him to rest and food for him to eat, and also a stout lock upon its door and bars of iron at the window.

At first, confined in expectation of a trial, he was tended well, or as well as a poor village could supply, his bowl and water-jar filled and the lengthy addresses which he delivered at intervals attended to in case some element should be material to his case. But weeks passed and then months and the magistrate never came, detained elsewhere in his province, perhaps, or simply choosing to neglect this tiny edge of empire, passing it by on the way to somewhere more important, and the unknown man in his cell became gradually a fixture of the village, a being without future or past. He ate food when they remembered to bring it and dined on rainwater and unripe fruit when they did not; sometimes he still preached to the playing children or to the chickens that scratched in the dust, but more often he sat in silence, restlessly sliding a handful of stones on an imaginary board or moving his lips in what might have been a prayer. Only now and again, when the moon tracked across the nighttime sky, he would take hold of the bars and weep, demanding his freedom and lamenting a lost love. 

That he was mad, no doubt, but he was not yet Madness: he struggled still to find sense in the world, though it shifted and flickered around him. At one time he would think himself in the walled garden, hunting lizards to show as a prize, and at another he would take up a flagon, ready to pour for the customers at his counter, a joke on his lips, or know that he knelt in the chapel, cold flags under his knees and the flame of devotion alight in his heart; but the singing of his brothers was only the wild dawn shrieks of the hyenas, the flagon, when he tipped it up, was empty and his only companions the scavenging crows, and cupping his hands to capture a darting shadow on the wall he would recoil in horror and confusion at the sight of his severed wrist. Time and again his vision would clear and he would think he knew himself, yet every time the ground, apparently so solid, would shiver under his feet and give way once more, plunging him to another place and a different life. So madness came at last to fill him up, until vessel of his mind overflowed and the scent of insanity was sent smoking upwards too persistent to ignore. 

\--

The girl came to him one day at dusk after a brief rain. He did not remember a key turning in the lock nor the door opening, but from one moment to another she was with him in his cell. It was long since any had borne him company and he watched her cautiously for a time, sitting with her legs crossed, scrutinising the stones laid out on his invisible board. Her clothes were strange to him, a ragged coat, too large, that she clutched around her and her feet bare, but around her neck she wore a chain of square emeralds set in silver, ropes of pearls and a hammered golden collar. Her hair was of many colours all together and when she bent forward to pick up a pebble it fell to hide her face. She tapped the stone across the board, leapfrogging his own counters one by one, and as she did each turned to a dun-winged moth which spiralled up seeking the moon’s light in the window. The girl sat back in triumph. ‘What do I win?’ 

‘A gelatine,’ he told her seriously, and a look of anxiety crossed her face.  
‘I don’t have any of those.’ She squinted at him, her eyes strangely mismatched in the dim light. ‘Who are you?’ she asked, though she was his visitor and he the startled host. 

‘I am…’ He trailed off awkwardly, finding he had no answer to give, and when he looked again he found that she had altered somewhat, her hair now roughly cropped, so short that her scalp showed through in places, though but a moment before it had been long. He thought perhaps that if she was his guest he should offer her refreshment and picked up the pitcher, but to his dismay it was empty. ‘We have no wine,’ he told her, ‘and no more bread.’ 

‘Are you hungry?’ The girl put her head on one side, considering. ‘I was hungry once. I think.’ The moon lay reflected in a puddle at their feet, a fat pitted disc like an offering-cake, and she reached into the skim of water to pick it up, broke off a piece and held it out to him. He took it eagerly, cramming it sweet and crumbly into his mouth, and the taste of it swept him with a wave first of delight, and on its heels an echoing sorrow. 

The girl patted his arm. ‘I know who you are,’ she told him. ‘You’re mine.’ 

The madman took another piece of the moon from her. ‘Yours?’ Even after so short an acquaintance and strange as she was, she now seemed to him more solid and real than the insubstantial world around her.

‘My family thought you were theirs first.’ She giggled, so infectiously that he laughed too. ‘My oldest brother tried for the longest time, and then my sister nearly took you, only she didn’t.’ 

‘Your sister?’ Her words made no sense to him, yet he knew them to be true. 

The girl smiled brightly. ‘Death. And after that my sister-brother wanted to keep you for their own, until they didn’t any more.’ She dusted imaginary crumbs from her coat with an exaggerated care. ‘They never keep anyone for good.’ 

‘Will you keep me?’ The question seemed important, though he could not have said why. 

The woman leaned towards him and her scent, of fever sweat and late nights, sour wine and old leather, caught in his throat like tears. ‘Always’. She touched her lips to his ravaged face, then jumped to her feet. ‘Come on. We don’t need to stay here.’

She flitted to the window as the moths had done, then suddenly she was on the other side of the wall, walking away. Some stubborn part of him remembered the iron bars that imprisoned him, but he knew better now; though he felt the metal cold under his fingers still, it no longer held meaning for him and he stepped through easily into the night behind her. 

The sky was ablaze with stars, taking their chance to shine in the moon’s absence, and the villagers, perhaps prudently, in their homes; side by side the two wanderers padded through the evening streets, strangeness following in their wake. A wooden carving beside a door came to life as they passed, stretching out one hand in entreaty and using the other to hide its nakedness: the girl whisked a shawl from an unattended windowsill and settled it around the carving’s shoulders, and the figure stroked its folds, pleased, as the wool stiffened to dark wood. 

At another house a rack of fish, cleaned and left out to dry, began to sing in a sweet discordant chorus; the wiser of the villagers stopped their ears, but not all were so careful. 

‘Listen!’ said a man where he lay secretly entwined with his lover below a casement. ‘I have never heard-‘ 

‘How cold you are!’ interrupted his beloved, then screamed as her hands discovered the scales of the giant serpent that coiled about her.

A little further on rats scuffled beside some jars of grain, and at the wanderers’ approach instead of fleeing one sat up, cleaning its whiskers. ‘Where is the moon?’ it asked its fellow.

‘That one ate it,’ chirped the other crossly, ‘and now it will be dark all night.’ 

The madman looked across at his companion, then leaned down to touch one of the jars, which unsealed itself with a sigh. ‘ _I_ would not be so selfish,’ commented the first rat piously, but the second, already burrowing head down into the grain, made no reply. 

Together they strolled along the river, past the drying fishers’ nets. The madman considered. ‘I am here, but am I out there still?’ he asked his companion. ‘Is there another child playing in the courtyard and another sulky labourer in the field? Does a young man serve days-old stew in the tavern and a monk speak his prayers in the chapel?’ 

The girl shrugged. ‘Of course.’ She pointed to his hand, which suddenly held the jawbones of an ass. 

‘Then there is one also at the court of a beautiful lady and I hope he strangles her,’ said the jawbones, and the madman covered his mouth in a show of contrition. 

‘Do you know yourself now?’ Delirium asked. 

‘I do.’ The madman spread his arms, laying himself open for the unreason of the world to come pouring in, and in its flood the fragments of his shattered selves danced and settled, forming finally a kaleidoscope whole. His figure grew, and hers beside him, swelling upwards until they towered together above the tiny village, their shadows stretching far across the desert. Their heads brushed against the velvet night sky, setting the stars chiming, and some came falling like glowing dust to settle on his robe like jags of glass or diamond. ‘I am a prince, it would seem,’ the madman observed. 

Delirium waved an arm and in an instant was clad in a gown of silk and feathers, beaded slippers on her feet. ‘You can be everything. You will be.’ She fanned herself into a hundred shapes, known and unknown, and he had never loved her more. 

The madman prince bowed. ‘Should I take this realm for my own?’ 

‘Let them share your gift,’ Delirium said; she touched his brow, oddly formal, and then he was alone.

He walked on, huge through the night, tasting the potential of the world and its million dreaming minds. ‘A human life is a small thing,’ he mused to himself, ‘and I have been caged too long. The whole world shall be my domain.’ 

Then he spoke aloud, the words falling from his mouth like glowing embers. ‘I will live in men’s hearts and minds, too deep to be uprooted. I will be the water that laps and spreads unseen, the smoke that finds the chink and cannot be kept out, the worm in the unopened bud. Let them know me.’ He swept his robe around him, and in his hand the ass’s jawbones clicked, speaking his name for the first time. _Prince Madness. Chuz._

**Author's Note:**

> Speak to me: fontainebleau22.tumblr.com


End file.
